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Crowdsourcing

As media and technology are rapidly changing the quantity and quality of the information circulated in our daily lives, we all know intuitively that our practices and standards for dealing with these shifts has not caught up.

The purpose of the CrowdGlobe project is to study various crowdsourced-mapping platforms, searching for data patterns that can tell us more about the functions of these tools and their limits as well as potentials.

What is—or ought—to be the role of technology in supporting human rights, and to what extent is technology a human right? Recent years have seen the evolution of a panoply of digital tools that allow users to bridge space and spread ideas, democratizing information that can have a critical impact in the social and political spheres.

The Internews Center for Innovation & Learning commissioned iHub Research (Nairobi, Kenya) to conduct a 4-month study in Ghana beginning in September 2011 to understand the impact of the EPAWA SMS Helpline Network pilot project on the local human trafficking network, as well as the impact of the project on the local communities involved.

At the 2012 International Conference of Crisis Mappers (ICCM) in October, Anahi Ayala Iacucci, Innovation Advisor for the Africa Region, Health and Humanitarian Media, detailed new techniques to verify crowdsourced information, including techniques to assess the veracity of the content, the context and the source.

The "Orange Revolution" was a series of protests and political upheavals in Ukraine that lasted from late November 2004 to January 2005. The protests were triggered by the results of the 2004 presidential election, which was fraught with accusations of massive corruption, voter intimidation, and direct electoral fraud.

Civic activists in Armenia used crowdsourcing and mapping technologies for the first time during the 2012 parliamentary elections to make electoral processes more transparent. The IDitord project, built on Ushahidi Open Source platform, became one of the main platforms which aggregated information on violations during elections. Several organizations and dozens of internet activists used new media tools to monitor the election process during the Armenian parliamentary elections on May 6, 2012.

While the developing world is getting mature with technology and creative middleware apps, CIS and Russia are getting more democratic with the help of crowdsourcing. Many years ago it was a united territory of USSR and people still know Russian... everywhere.